Japanese Recall the Fiery Dawn of Nuclear Age

In a poignant ceremony, Japan marked the apocalyptic advent of the nuclear age 50 years ago today with doves, song and silent prayer for the victims of Hiroshima.

At exactly 8:15 a.m.--the historic moment when an American B-29 dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over this western Japanese city--Hiroshima became hushed, as heads bowed amid a silence broken only by the striking of the city peace bell and the incessant drone of cicadas.

For one full minute, all debate over the nuclear attack, war and peace, guilt and blame stopped as thousands of people here united in a prayer of solace for those who suffered--and a wish that no one should ever again be subjected to a similar fate.

“On the day of the atomic bombing, people died in an instant. They died while seeking help, while suffering agony,” Hiroshima sixth-grader Kenji Yamaguchi read from a children’s declaration under hazy skies before a crowd estimated at 60,000 at the city’s Peace Memorial Park. The gathering included Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, bereaved families, citizen activists and visitors from around the world.

“We have come to feel ever more strongly that the tragedy of Hiroshima must never be repeated,” the declaration said.

The “Little Boy” bomb brought an end to the bloodiest war in history, perhaps saved many lives and paved the way for the transformation of a militaristic Japan into a democratic nation boasting the world’s second-richest economy and a national constitution renouncing war.

But the bomb also caused ghastly deaths not only of soldiers but also of tens of thousands of schoolchildren, mothers, the elderly and other civilians. They were rocked by the bomb’s tremendous blast, seared by a scorching heat and exposed to the largest single dose of radiation ever unleashed on humans.

Although casualty estimates vary, the city recently said 87,833 had perished by December, 1945, and that 192,020 have died of bomb-related causes as of today.

People clogged the city’s rivers and died whimpering for water. They died as their charred skin came off, “like peeling a banana,” one survivor recalled. Others--who survived the blast and the heat--died when their weakened bodies, punctured by glass and other flying debris, succumbed to the insidious effects of radiation on their blood and tissue.

“I cannot but repeat in the strongest possible terms that the development and possession of nuclear weapons constitutes a crime against humanity,” Hiroshima Mayor Takashi Hiraoka declared in a statement at the 64-minute peace ceremony.

Mindful of the need to acknowledge Japan as aggressor as well as victim, however, Hiraoka also said, “The suffering of all the war’s victims indelibly etched in our hearts, we want to apologize for the unbearable suffering that Japanese colonial domination and war inflicted on so many people.” The statement was broader than previous ones, in which he offered regrets only to Japan’s Asian war victims.

Prime Minister Murayama reiterated Japan’s firm intent never to own, develop or use nuclear weapons and to work for global disarmament “as the only nation in the history of humankind to experience the devastation of atomic bombing.” He also urged China and France to halt nuclear testing.

Visitors began camping out Saturday at the peace park, a green expanse of monuments, a museum and an eternal flame. Wearing everything from backpacks to Buddhist robes, they lighted incense and burned candles, offered prayers and placed colored wreaths of paper cranes at the memorial sites.

The cranes are a famous symbol of Sadako Sasaki, a schoolgirl who was told she would recover from her debilitating radiation disease if she folded 1,000 cranes. But she died at age 11 after folding 964.

By 6 a.m. today, small groups had gathered to commemorate the day in their own ways. Strumming guitars, about two dozen Hiroshima high school students sang “We Are the World” and other songs before the children’s memorial monument.

“We have no power but song, which can express our hopes and wishes,” the group leader told the early morning crowd. “They say songs have no national boundaries and can remain in people’s hearts.”

The first ceremony began at 6:15 a.m., an ecumenical gathering to commemorate the tens of thousands of unidentified victims whose ashes are buried at the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound. Stepping up to an altar laden with flowers, fruit and drinks, Shinto priests performed purification rites, while Christian ministers sang hymns and offered prayers and Buddhist monks chanted.

For Nobuko Kioka, 60, the ceremony stirred anguished memories of two sisters and a brother who died in the atomic attack but whose bodies were never recovered. Kioka, a fifth-grader at the time who escaped unscathed, said she usually mourns in the privacy of her own home.

“I don’t want to think about it, because when I do the tears come out,” she said, her face strained as she clutched flowers and Buddhist prayer beads. “I saw many people dying around me . . . corpses in the river. I should think of these things, but when I do I become very emotional.”

As she closed her eyes during the silent prayer, Yoshiko Koshino, 68, said she recalled the precise moment the bomb exploded, sending debris hurtling into her body and those of seven friends who died at age 17. “They never experienced the bullet train or the Tokyo Olympics,” she lamented.

The official ceremony, which began at 8 a.m., was preceded by the dedication of water to the souls of victims who died begging for it. Officials and bereaved family representatives also dedicated flowers and a register of the names of atomic bomb victims.

In addition to the official addresses, 1,500 doves were released and a 900-member wind ensemble and chorus offered a song of peace.

Other events were scheduled far into the night: the traditional river-floating of candle-burning lanterns symbolizing the passage of souls from this world to the next; an outdoor Noh performance, illuminated by torches, by “living national treasure” Shozo Nakamori, who wrote a special play depicting Hiroshima’s rise, fall and recovery.

The city and the nonprofit Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation were also scheduled to open a global forum on “nuclear civilization” later today.

The anniversary events began a few days before today’s climactic ceremony and have included candlelight concerts of classical music, Buddhist fasts, Lions Club dedications, international student forums and the planting of a rose garden for peace by Los Angeles artist Gail Cottman.

The events have transformed this industrial city of 1.1 million people into an international peace mecca, luring thousands of pilgrims from throughout Japan and the world. Interviews with them make one thing clear: Despite the simple anti-nuclear message of most of the events, Hiroshima exists less as a single symbol of peace than as a prism reflecting a complexity of views colored by different experiences.

To Choi Sung Won, a 66-year-old Hiroshima hotel owner, Hiroshima symbolizes the hardship of Koreans in Japan. Many of them were forcibly brought to Japan as virtual slave labor during World War II only to perish in the atomic attack. Choi, who said he and his family came voluntarily after the Japanese colonial rulers grabbed their land, saw his younger sister lying charred and naked on the riverside before she died.

He and other Koreans, ranging from women in traditional costumes to cyclists from Seoul in fluorescent yellow shirts, commemorated the deaths of 20,000 compatriots at a gray stone memorial monument Saturday.

But in what Choi and others said reflects the continuing bias against ethnic Koreans in Japan, the memorial stone is located outside the city’s official peace park--and efforts to move it inside have bogged down in debate over whether it should represent both South and North Koreans. “This memorial stone is a symbol of discrimination against Koreans,” Choi said.

To three high school students from Irvine, Hiroshima reflects the complexity of war--and the interpretation of its history. Jill Stevenson, Brooke Clayton and Kristin Stephenson, University High School students who traveled to Japan on an exchange program, said the opportunity to witness the anniversary prompted them to delve far more deeply into the attack than they ever had at school.

The event was briefly mentioned in their history class as an inevitable act to end the war, they said, while far more time was spent on Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack, the Holocaust and the European war front.

But after reading up on the bomb and hearing firsthand about its horrors during their two-week stay, two of the three are unsure whether it was right to use the bomb.

“I can’t say yes or no,” said Clayton, 15. “Even though I side with my own country because of patriotism, you come here and see all the destruction. We should study history more internationally--not just how it affected America.”

For David Boilley, a French professor of nuclear physics, Hiroshima sparked reflection on the worldwide controversy over his own nation’s nuclear testing. Edward Paja felt a pressing need, driven by memories of the Auschwitz death camp run by Nazi Germany in his native Poland, to cycle for three months to reach the site of another monument to human tragedy.

Koji Yashita and Migaku Arata, Japanese college students, saw Hiroshima as an eloquent reason why their nation should abolish all weapons, downgrade its Self-Defense Forces into a disaster relief corps, end its security alliance with the United States and declare neutrality.

Only then will Japan, freed from American influence, come into its own and win respect, they said.

“We should be an eternal symbol of peace and the nation most trusted by Asia,” said Yashita, 20, who added that apologies and compensation to Japan’s neighbors are necessary.

But for the elderly survivors themselves, Hiroshima reverberates not as a symbol of lofty concepts or intellectual debate. Fifty years later, the dropping of the atomic bomb signifies an intensely personal experience of losing loved ones to agonizing deaths, of the horrific destruction of their towns, their homes and their lives.

All Chiyoko Fukuma knows is that her younger sister Yoko, a nursing trainee with a carefree manner, died somewhere on the day of the bomb. She was 18.

Fukuma searched the city for days but could never find her sister’s body. The sight of the bloated bodies in the river, of piles of corpses and the constant moaning from the parched victims calling for water are indelibly etched in her mind. So every year, she comes to quench their thirst and, she prays, to heal their souls, sprinkling water from a plastic bottle before the memorial mound of unidentified victims.

For Fukuma, Hiroshima means a memory she can’t extinguish even if she tried. “My sister died in such a miserable way,” she said, her eyes reddening with tears.

Chiaki Kitada of the Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.